Hatred in a temperate climate. Antoine and Margaux. It’s pretty. Very French. Like the title of a forgotten Jacques Becker film. It also gives you an air of nice neighborhoods, of Sundays at the in-laws and children bickering in the garden. And in fact, Antoine and Margaux, children, they have two, Maxime and Emma (which is also quite charming). As for social status, they are not to be pitied either, he a surgeon, she a novelist. And yet, the war… Antoine and Margaux Maurepas may have loved each other, they now hate each other and decline their reciprocal detestation at will, to whoever is willing to listen and first and foremost, since there is a divorce, to a family court judge.
These two antagonistic beings, totally abandoned to their hatred, are the sad heroes of French Divorcethe new novel by Éliette Abécassis. The novelist, whose prodigality is no longer in doubt, has two favorite subjects, or rather, two obsessions (of those that make a writer). Jewishness – with transmission, exiles – and the couple – with its setbacks, its transfigurations. It is of course towards the latter that she once again takes the pen to the wound. French Divorce is a choral novel. The novelist has the ex-spouses parade before the court, or testify in writing, not only whose reading of the facts leading to their separation is of course perfectly contradictory, but also those who were more or less active witnesses. Parents and in-laws, friends, lovers, the publisher of one, the accountant of the other… They all see midnight, betrayal, lies, at their door. The story of each of the two applicants seems incontestable. Margaux, a thriller author, which does not help her case, is after all, perhaps mad. Is Antoine the manipulative and violent pervert, with the gaping narcissistic wound, that his ex-wife denounces? In the meantime, the children count the points and the stray bullets… Éliette Abécassis conducts her case with true novelistic virtuosity and a rather disturbing rage. She gradually breaks down all the pretenses of propriety and it is the whole of society that takes the rap. The novel is dark, very dark. No one will leave here alive.
Eliette Abécassis
French Divorce
Grasset
Print run: 11,000 copies.
Price: €20.90; 288 p.
ISBN: 9782246836445
